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For this third volume in Hyperion's Brahms Songs cycle, Graham Johnson is joined by the young German tenor Simon Bode in his debut recording for the label. Equally at home in the opera house and the recital hall, Bode's is a voice fusing control a ...» More

Brahms approached the poetry of Heine rather tentatively. The poet had ‘belonged’ above all to his mentor, Robert Schumann, and to the Schubert of Schwanengesang. Thus he avoids the well-trodden paths of the Buch der Lieder (1827) and finds a poem in the Romanzen (Neue Lieder) of 1839 entitled Frühling (which he then renamed, using the poem’s refrain). He also chooses to avoid Heine’s narcissistic melancholy. At first this seems all light and air, the most delightful of the Heine settings: there is no faithless girl and, as this is not an ‘Ich’ poem, no soulful meditation on the ever-betrayed poet. But betrayal there is, nevertheless and, as almost always with Heine, an ironic sting in the tail of the lyric. Here is a vignette of a shepherd girl weaving a spring garland of flowers; the knight who passes by so blithely has at one time been her faithless lover. She dumps her bouquet as the nightingale sings, a sound that traditionally betokens unhappy, unfulfilled love. But this is what has always happened in spring as the sap rises, all part of the lusty, priapic picture. Brahms is ever the artful colourist: the airy accompaniment of the opening with quavers that dart and weave; the knight’s music in galloping triplets effortlessly incorporated in the mix; the faster music, marked animato, for the throwing of the flowers into the river; a moment of birdsong, and then a pandemonium of semiquavers to accompany the final refrain—the forces of nature rampant. The poet’s (and composer’s) vicarious delight in observing all the fun, and the pain, about to break loose in springtime brings forth a tumult of merry, major-key music. Grim glee.

Silver moon, with pale rays You paint both wood and field, Imbue mountains and valleys With sighs of longing. Be the confidant of my sorrows, You who sail over the sea of space; Tell her, whom I carry in my heart, How the pangs of love are killing me.

Tell her that across a thousand miles My heart yearns for her. ‘No distance can heal it, Only a loving look from you.’ Tell her that this frame of mine, Stricken to death, will soon decay; May a single flattering hope Hold it together.

Music in praise of the moon is usually diaphanous and atmospheric, as transparent as a beam of light. The fragility of the Brahms song Mondenschein to a Heine text is a case in point. Occasionally, however, this friendly satellite inspires a more robust musical response, usually when the moon is addressed by an earthbound mortal. In Schubert’s Seidl setting Der Wanderer an den Mond the tramp of the traveller is built into the music, as well as his somewhat misanthropic view of life, and he speaks to the moon (a masculine noun in German, feminine in French) man-to-man. Although it is not intimated in the text, it is likely that this poem by Simrock, certainly not the finest poem that Brahms ever set, was also meant to incorporate the determined trudge of someone unhappy who is making his way through a moonlit landscape. Perhaps the piano’s left-hand chords represent a guitar to indicate a serenade, whether stationary or ambulant.

Even if the singer is not on the move the moon is always adrift. The Bewegung in triplets is prophetic of the Heine setting Meerfahrt, composed some seven years later—an indication that Brahms imagines a ship at sea and the moon in the heavens both wading through a similar watery lagoon, a medium buoyant enough to encourage the rise and fall of triplets that gently bob above and below the water line, viscous enough to produce sonorous sixths in the middle of the piano—no Clair de lune this! Simrock’s metre results in a succession of three-bar musical phrases, one for each line of verse. The introduction to the whole song is also a solo of three bars, rather than the symmetrical four. This length of phrase is a continuing feature of the song and gives a curious limp to the music, a feeling of being out of breath, as if the singer were tired or disillusioned or at the end of his tether. Of course this is exactly the case as we are soon to discover. After an interlude, the traveller asks permission to confide his sorrows to his lunar friend (‘Sei Vertrauter meiner Schmerzen’). When there is clearly no answer from the long-suffering moon (implied by the verbal silence of another three-bar interlude) the narrator embarks on his fervent petition.

With ‘Sag’ ihr, die ich trag’ im Herzen’, the nub of the song, the triplets disappear from the music and the atmosphere changes completely. We may have expected a woebegone complaint from this traveller but Brahms supplies him instead with a declaration of love worthy of the beauty of his lunar intermediary. The marking is dolce. In the piano-writing (beginning in F sharp major, the dominant of the home key) there is a suggestion of distant muted horns—an evocation of the empty forests and the vast and peaceful terrain that separate the poet from his lover, distances that would be easy for the moon to traverse as a messenger and go-between. After this oasis of tranquillity the triplets reappear, a piano interlude that begins in G major and then reverts to B minor. With ‘Sag’ ihr, daß zu Tod getroffen’ the voice takes up the triplet motif for the next six bars. A return of those distant horn calls, now in G major (at ‘Nur ein schmeichlerisches Hoffen’), promises further peaceful reflection, but a shift to C major (‘Sei’s, das sie zusammenhält’) and a heightened tessitura turns the screw in terms of anguish. These two lines of poetry are then repeated even more ardently and desperately in B major. In the tenor of this writing the supplicant is no longer contained and dignified, perhaps because he realizes that the moon is powerless, or unwilling, to accede to his request. The eleven-bar postlude lavishly employs the materials of the opening, first to darker and more intense effect, and then distancing and thinning out the music as the traveller, embittered and disappointed, disappears over the horizon. Unlike Schubert’s moonstruck traveller he has learned nothing that might lighten his heart.

The whispering trees here bear witness to the poet’s love; his secret is the subject of their sylvan gossip. The Alsatian pastor Karl Candidus was a variable poet (Brahms appreciated his German patriotism regarding the disputed Rhineland) but these words of an unlikely (and necessarily wordless) colloquy are just about poetic enough for the composer to have created one of his instrumental songs, which is to say a beautiful piece of chamber music via generalized scene-painting—evening breezes, swaying trees, open-air vistas in woodland scenery. Brahms invents a characteristic motif for the accompaniment: in 6/4 there are six quavers in each dotted-minim beat, and by dividing these between the hands in lulling arpeggios (the right hand entering on the fourth quaver) the composer creates a cat’s cradle for a languid and sensuous vocal line (more of a pattern than a tune) that becomes memorable only on account of will power, artful juxtapositions and sequences—we observe every aspect of a composer’s craft whereby magic is conjured from sparse raw material. The poem says so little, in fact, that others can invent imagery of their own imagining. The surgeon Theodor Billroth (one of Brahms’s closest friends) wrote to Eduard Hanslick that he heard in this music ‘the most exquisite scent of lilies in the moonlight’—a heady fragrance almost certainly suggested by the song’s rapturous closing page where the atmosphere seems heavily enveloped by a languid perfume of layered harmonies and throbbing bass-notes. The unusual postlude clears the air: in complete contrast to the langsamer of the preceding bars, it is marked stringendo. Quavers (in 3/2 rather than 6/4) sidle up the stave with a smile; after much rather serious rhapsodizing we experience at last a touch of the composer’s sheer delight as he imagines himself in possession of a secret as delicious as this.

Among Brahms’s love songs this ebullient siege of virtue is the exception that proves the rule. Time and again in the composer’s lieder the suitor is lonely or rebuffed; most serenades prove ‘vergeblich’ (in vain). Brahms usually places himself, and his own romantic doubts and inadequacies, in the middle of scarcely concealed autobiographical picture. Songs that have begun passionately end in a whimper or moan, and almost always in a piano dynamic. Playing the rogue and roué is hardly a Brahmsian speciality, but Karl Lemcke, little-known poet of seven fine Brahms songs, has somehow enabled the composer to think outside the box and create, with considerable zest, something depersonalized, as if a quasi-operatic aria. Mozart created his Don Giovanni, after all, without necessarily approving of him, and without being in the grip of a comparable sex addiction; the prudish disapproval of the composer’s worshipped Elisabet von Herzogenberg for Willst du, dass ich geh? was unreasonable. Brahms in love, abashed and tortured, is a familiar image, but we know almost nothing about his amorous escapades when idealistic devotion was not on the cards. Billroth, who heartily approved of this song, travelled several times to Italy with Brahms; there were bachelors’ expeditions, and goodness knows what the pair got up to. In this music of scurrying, and scurrilous, semiquavers (bad weather outside, questionable motives within) all the stays have been loosened, including the girl’s. The strophic form cleverly depicts the mounting pressure employed to effect the seduction, affirming the adage ‘third—or even fourth—time lucky’. There is a marvellously spooky evocation of the witch in the willows, even if this hardened suitor’s fear of encountering her is entirely fake. The passages marked immer etwas ruhiger (setting the song’s title to music) evoke waves of wheedling charm and glow with insincerity. The last verse, marked Lebhaft (cancelling the previous smarmily suggestive ritardando) clinches the outcome; in the final forte chords we can imagine the singer pouncing on his (almost certainly willing) victim. All along ‘Do you wish me to go?’ has been an entirely rhetorical question. Brahms selected this line as his title; Lemke’s (the fourth word altered by Brahms in the song) was Auf der Haide saust der Wind.

Writing to his friend, the great Viennese critic, Eduard Hanslick, Theodor Billroth praises this song as ‘sweet without sugariness … full of feeling without sentimentality … thoughtful feeling without conscious sensuality’. Minnelied is full-hearted, but it has a ‘restraint and decorum’ (Sams) that is worthy of its title, a tradition of song that goes back to medieval times and the courtly love tradition of the troubadours. Brahms’s discovery of the eighteenth-century Hölty (edited in both early and posthumous collaboration by his friend Voss) was almost certainly inspired by Schubert’s settings of this poet, though Schubert’s own Minnelied, D429, was unpublished and unknown in 1877 when this song was composed by Brahms. Mendelssohn had also composed a rather beautiful setting (Op 8 No 1) in 1827. Of course there is a warmth and effulgence in the Brahms that has made it more famous than its predecessors. It boasts one of the composer’s loveliest tunes—although, surprisingly, it is probably not original. Folk-song enthusiast and musical magpie as he was, Brahms seems to have modelled the melody on a reasonably popular dance-tune by Joseph Gungl (1810–1889), who duly complained of a musical theft. If Brahms was indeed inspired by Gungl’s Styrian ditty, only he would have known how to iron out its angular, almost yodelling, contours into a gentle song of home-spun love and devotion. The accompaniment, an unfolding sequence of supportive undulations, underpins the vocal line and contributes to a musical depiction of tenacious affection. The middle section (from ‘Ohne sie ist Alles tot’) is based on an equally tenacious dominant pedal that makes the return to the tonic key (for ‘Traute, minnigliche Frau’) pleasurably inevitable. Although this is hardly a folk-song setting, it has something of the folk song about it: these heartfelt feelings, those of a simple and lucky soul, are expressed within the context of a healthy country life. For the metropolitan Brahms, love was a far more complicated affair of course. The composer’s rueful admiration for this kind of idealized relationship has added something deeper to the open-air simplicity of the poet: an undertone of haunting ‘Sehnsucht’ has assured the song its worldwide fame.